Archive for October 2015

The place was awash in little girls this afternoon. I think I counted seven, at one point. A couple of them were even ours.

Here is great-granddaughter Liliana on her gaited pony . . .

Here are some spectators. Can you tell which one has been on a horse lately?

Liliana’s little sister Isabella was not impressed.

The sun was really bright . . . but it sure lit up Isabella’s red hair!

I think it’s true; there is a natural affinity between little girls and horses.

We had some excitement yesterday. I was going out to catch Kitty — Marion and I rode out again — when I looked up and saw a couple of deputies headed down into the river bottom. One appeared to have a gun drawn. There were eight or nine of them searching the brush. They were apparently looking for the renegade deputy who had escaped from custody earlier.

Needless to say, Marion and I went in the opposite direction.

Just a couple of hours ago, we learned they had captured that deputy, who was wanted on a variety of charges. He was said to have brandished a firearm at a group of little girls. He was found in Oildale, all right, so maybe he had passed by. It’s a relief that he was caught with no harm done to anyone. But it was a weird episode.

There was an exceptionally large and beautiful sundog in the western sky last night.

A sundog, if you don’t know, is a patch of rainbow iridescence in the clouds caused by light refracting through ice crystals. They are called sundogs because they appear to faithfully follow the sun in the sky. There are usually two, and there were in this case. The other, though, was behind some trees and didn’t seem as bright.

My cell phone wouldn’t capture the full range of colors. This was actually much more colorful than it appears here — a patch of rainbow.

Here are the real dogs, waiting patiently under the sky “dog” for me finish fooling with that darned camera and throw the ball.

I looked out of the window this morning, and saw Gena (left) and Xena (right) enjoying a nap on the old sofa. It’s set out in front of the office to be picked up for disposal, but they’re making good use of it.

Now the trouble with this is that one — or both — of them is the reason it’s going to the dump. You can see the cozy little nest Gena — or Xena — has excavated on the left-hand side. As a dog bed, it’s great. As a place for people to sit — not so much.

Gena is sitting in the hole, but I think Xena has the guiltier expression.

And, though I hate to mention it, I have seen Skip the neighboring pointer lifting his leg on the sofa, too. It’s definitely time for it to go.

Right now, there are two white plastic chairs where the sofa was. There’s not much they can do to them.

We did get that promised rain, and a pretty good one, too — maybe a tenth of an inch. It was nothing, though, compared to the downpours all around us.

The humidity was high after the rain, but I was still surprised when I got up this morning and peered through the window.

There was fog in every direction.

It had lifted a bit by the time I took this shot. There are two horses there, if you look closely.

When we rode later, it was nice to see the plantings at Panorama Vista looking so happy.

Peaches just enjoyed the puddles, gross and muddy though they were. Xena disapproves — though she had tried a smaller puddle herself.

We had been smelling smoke pretty strongly for a day or two. Today, we heard that one of the stables downriver had a haystack struck by lightning during the big storm Wednesday night, and had other damage caused by the strike as well. That would account for the smell, which wasn’t quite like woodsmoke. No people or animals were injured, but a haystack is a big loss for a stable. That’s why ours are spaced so far apart, though we never thought of one being struck by lightning. Hay fires are not uncommon — though very hard to put out — but lightning is not the usual cause!